ctionate manner spoke
hopefully of meeting them there on the same day of the following year.
It was not to be. On the next day he felt somewhat unwell; in two or
three days bronchitis and pleurisy supervened; and in the afternoon of
Friday, the 5th of January, 1873, his long, honourable, and useful life
terminated.

[Illustration]

HENRY VAN WART, J.P.

Many years ago I was one of a small dinner party of gentlemen at a
house in the Hagley Road. I was a comparative stranger, for I only
knew the host and two others who were there. I was a young man,
and all the other guests were men of middle age. The party had been
invited for the purpose of introducing me to "a few old friends," and
I was to be married the next day to a relative of the host. Sitting
opposite to me at table was a gentleman of some fifty or sixty years
of age, whose fine oval face and ample brow struck me as having the
most benevolent and "fatherly" expression I had ever seen. The custom
had not then quite died out of toasting the guests at dinner parties,
and upon a hint from the host this gentleman rose, and in simple and
apparently sincere phrase, proposed to the company to drink my health.
I mention it now, because I remember in what a kindly, genial way
he pointed out to me the course of conduct best calculated to secure
happiness in the state into which I was so soon to enter. I recollect,
too, how his voice faltered as he spoke of his own long and happy
experience as a husband and a father, and mentioned that in one great
trouble of his life it was the loving support of his wife that enabled
him to bear, and eventually to overcome it. The speaker was Henry Van
Wart.

I suppose the impressionable state of my own mind at the time, made
me peculiarly susceptible to external influences, and fixed minute
circumstances more intensely on my memory; so that I now vividly
recall the thought which then occurred to me--that I had never before
seen so much gentleness and calm quiet benignity in a _man_. The
impression then rapidly formed has lasted ever since, for in all the
long years from that day until his death I never had cause to abate
one jot of the reverential feeling with which he then inspired me. I
have had hundreds of business transactions with his house; I have seen
him often in the magistrate's chair; and I have met him publicly and
privately, and he had always the same bland, suave, courteous, and
kindly bearing. Strength of charac